


Tidal

by Ladycat



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 05:57:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he finally stumbles into a seat, it’s clear that this woman—girl, really, all coltish limbs and wide, malleable smiles—is queen of the court.  She’s swaggering without moving, sprawled over a chair that proclaims ownership to anyone with eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tidal

“You _frak.”_

It’s the voice he notices first. Navigating a bar is like finding your sea-legs after weeks on dry land. The first few moments are overwhelming, wave after wave of noise that obscures the shifting landscape, blues and blinding sprays of grey making you sway from one table to the next, the smell of beer and stale human sweat like sea-salt hanging over everything. Carl wasn’t uncertain of his welcome, not really, but he keeps himself to bumping into chairs and not people mostly by dint of will.

“No, you don’t, you _frak!_ Give that back!”

The voice belongs to a woman, but it’s not very feminine. Karl concentrates on it like his own version of a lighthouse, following the beacon further into the dark. Nuggets are a nervous bunch, normally, but this is their home-turf and he’s just the newest recruit to ‘welcome’.

A burst of uproarious laughter makes him stumble, cursing as he rams into a chair. The occupant snaps off something uncomplimentary and Karl tries his damndest not to blush. That’s blood in the water, here.

“Hey, new boy!” The same strident, penetrating voice—Karl thinks she’ll make someone a damn good fisherwife, and wonders what to call it when it’s the air instead of the sea—makes heads turn and suddenly Karl’s in a pool of silence. “Come sit over here by me.”

Hoots ring out and frak, he _is_ blushing. A few of the women coo sarcastically to him, but Karl didn’t fight his way up from the coasts of Caprica to back down because a few women found him pathetically cute. It’s not all that different from school, anyway.

When he finally stumbles into a seat, it’s clear that this woman—girl, really, all coltish limbs and wide, malleable smiles—is queen of the court. She’s swaggering without moving, sprawled over a chair that proclaims ownership to anyone with eyes. Beside her is a burly looking dark-haired man that looks uncomfortable so close to this pale firebrand of a woman. Like he knows he should run, but doesn’t want to.

Karl straightens in his seat. “Karl Agathon.”

“I know. I saw you crash land today. Good job.” The others laugh, like it’s a joke, but there’s real respect in her voice. Carl’s still not sure how he kept his bird from splintering out from under him, but he did: it’s why he’s in the bar. “Think you can do it again tomorrow?”

“I think I could do it again right now.”

“Ooh,” she drawls, eyes smiling while her mouth smirks, “a fighter, boys. Looks like you’ve got some competition.”

They don’t, though. Karl knows that, and the only one smart enough to understand it—the one directly to her right—he’s not threatened at all. Not with her hand on his thigh, her shoulder pressed negligently back against his own.

“You challenging me, ma’am?”

Her smirk drops away, melting into something realer. Rarer, he guesses, as the table grows uncomfortable. Her eyes are grey as a stormy sea’s, and she smells like leather and salt and beer, a fixture in a room that collects them. “I’m no ma’am,” she drawls, leaning forward so a heavy lock of white falls over her eyebrows. “You gotta call me anything, call me Starbuck.”

“Yes ma’am,” Karl tosses back, and for the first time all night, grins. It’s a fierce, shark-like grin and she matches it tooth for gleaming tooth.

“Good boy,” she teases and when he finds out she’s the same damn class as him, starting a bare three weeks before, he smiles at her like she’s the sun cresting dawn-touched waves. Her laughter is infectious, charmingly innocent.

Karl likes that about her. Because it’s not long after meeting her that he sees her hands, and all the stories they carry.

* * *

Kara whoops, sliding onto the sofa with him so her legs spill over his lap. Her beer stains his shoulder, but frak, it’s not like he’s wearing his Colonial best. “Oh, man, _Karl_. We did it!”

She’s drunk, drunker than he’s ever seen her, and that includes after that one time they don’t go to the brig simply because he was there, blank-faced and accepting while she giggled and clutched the bag full of money and gems tighter to her chest. Stealing’s never about the take, for Kara.

His fingers rest over her ankles, warm skin and terribly fragile bone underneath. “We did.” Normally this is when he offers her coffee, when he tries to get her to remember that she’s not _always_ a mad pilot who doesn’t care about anything but the fastest, trickiest maneuver. “Congratulations, Lieutenant.”

“And to _you_ , Lieutenant!” She chokes back another swallowing, laughing as she coughs her airways clear. “Did you see the look on old Stoney’s face? Like he wanted to take the fraking pins back.” She touches them reverently, at odds with her brazen bravado, where they’re fastened by her neck.

She’s still in uniform. It stinks and Karl suspects he’s the one who’ll take it to the cleaners tomorrow. But that’s tomorrow, and right then Kara is curling up like the kitten she sometimes turns into, suddenly pliable and giving like she isn’t made of muscle harder than his own, of strength of will that’s never as brittle as people bet on, her hair fanning cloud-white over his shoulder. “You were there, Karl,” she says and doesn’t slur at all.

He was there. Unlike the Adamas.

His fingers trace patterns on her scalp, scratching over scars nobody knows about but maybe her doctor and Karl’s not taking any bets on that. Kara doesn’t talk about things, just lets them shout like the tattoos she’s slowly collecting, art that tells the story no words can approach. 

Karl’s always like picture books.

“You changed. How come you changed? Should still be wearing that pretty monkey suit you finally filled out enough to wear. Little Karl’s getting biiiiiig. No more beanpole.” She’s burrowing, now, trying to get closer, and when her hand slides south he grips her wrist—gentle, so damn gentle, like a sandcastle near to crumbling under the tide—to still her. “Karl. Frak, man, we _made_ it, we’re Lieutenants! Gonna ship out, finally do something worth it instead of all those frakking nuggets—”

Her voice breaks. He can feel her tense, contemplating a struggle. If she really tries, he knows he won’t deny her—or at least, he’s pretty sure he won’t. Sex is nothing to Kara. People call her slut behind her back, disapproving while awed all at the same time. Nobody’s half the woman Kara is. Not half the man she is, either, and that’s what gets all of them.

Only Karl sees the fissures underneath.

Sliding along her palm, he lifts her fingers up one at a time, letting the light catch her knuckles so he can read the lines, feel out each string hidden within the knots on her skin. She’s still, now. Scared. All Karl has to do is tug.

Lifting her hand all the way up, he kisses the center of her palm. “I’m making coffee. Do you want some?”

Anyone else, any time else, and she’d laugh, fight him, go smirking off into the night to find the frak or fight she’s after, the cadre of people that follow her around like she’s the moon, lighting up the night sky and reassuring them that tomorrow will come.

But Karl knows about the funeral, knows why the Adamas aren’t there—the _real_ reason—and when her eyes flicker, he knows how to catch and hold them. “Coffee, Starbuck. Want some?”

“Yeah. Coffee’s good.”

He’s adding the sugar—cream only, for her—when she sidles up to him, arms around his waist and chin on his shoulder blade. She’s gotten shorter over the years. “You said no.”

“You didn’t ask the right question,” he says and hands over her cup.

* * *

Lost in the darkness of _Galactica_ , Karl knows he’s losing bits of himself. He’s the last bastion of normal: not a leader but more than a soldier; a father to a curly-haired angel people call a monster, husband to a woman that isn’t. He’s the one who sees the normal people, the masses who aren’t dying because the Cylons come, but the ones who get trampled under foot, who starve and get sick because there’s nothing but spangled black around them, waves and waves of _nothing_ , and that nothing creeps closer every second.

“Have a drink,” she says, chair scraping back as her weight settles. “You ever notice how all we do is drink together?”

He toasts her with a solid clunk. “Situation normal, then.”

“Hm.” She sips instead of gulping. The sprawl is still there, but it’s drawn in, more defensive as she occupies her space and only that space. Everyone else’s is no longer interesting. “How you been, Karl Agathon?”

He looks at her. Once, long ago, he’d thought about spending his life with her. Oh, not back when they were kids, when she needed to stretch those long legs and devour the sky star by star. It’s later he fantasized about, bedrock to her quicksilver brightness, shoulder to her overreaching heights and the terrible crashes that sometimes—not always—follow. He always smiles at her daring stories and the rages with the same fond affection. They’re all Kara, after all.

Even this strangely shallow version, like her shadow’s gone missing and she’s not whole until it comes back.

He never thought he could value quietness that matches his own, strength that spreads out roots through metal like it’s the richest loam.

He grins at her, shark-bright, chin out. “Pretty good, Kara Anderson.”

She kicks him. “Asshole.”

“You deserved that, you know.”

She does, too, her eyes say while her mouth informs him of other choice issues she’s noticed. “What’re you doing out here, anyway?”

“Having a beer?”

She looks at the mug she’d brought him and the otherwise empty table. “I’m not sure this algae-crap qualifies as beer no matter how it’s fermented.”

“Get’s you drunk.”

“Is that really enough?” She says it quietly, to herself, and the look in her eye frightens him. He’s seen it before, the way they gleam through distances you need a ship to travel, riding the waves out to the edges of whatever it that drives her. Karl’s never understood it, but he’s always known it was there. It, too, is Kara. “I mean. Frak, I don’t know what I mean.”

That, however, _isn’t_ Kara. It’s always been instinctive, riding under the surface she’s never had the intuition or introspection to understand, but it was always _there_. Karl knew it.

But now it’s gone. Long before she disappeared to ‘find’ Earth, even, and Karl wishes he knew what prompted it, what made Kara grow into this broken-winged woman who wasn’t sure how to heal.

“You’ll get your sea legs back,” he says.

She squawks at him, “My _what?”_ , startled into laughter that rings against the hull, bouncing around him like sea-spray. Karl smiles back at her and drinks his beer. He doesn’t tell her about how the ship sometimes rocks, no matter how the gravity is supposed to keep it stable, the rhythms it breathes as it creaks and sways its way throughout space, the biggest damn lifeboat he’s ever seen.

“Karl—”

“Shut up, Kara,” he says, and her teeth click together, hard, eyes wide. “You’ll get them back. You just have to stop waiting for it to happen.”

“I’m not good at waiting.”

No, she isn’t. “So find something to do,” he says and gets up. He’s got a wife and daughter back in his quarters, waiting for him to come back from his manly adventures and a stack of paperwork that won’t get done until he sits down to do it. He’s got responsibilities. He’s got a _life_ , and he wonders how the hell he managed that while Kara still drifts, still chasing dreams she should’ve given up years ago.

He stops at the hatch. It’s noisy, behind him, the ebb and flow of conversation, bodies moving against metal that’s stopped echoing it’s grown so used to them. Kara’s the only moment of quiet, a discordant clang of emptiness that rings louder than Hot Dog’s braying laughter. “Go flying,” he says, under his breath, and knows that she hears him.

She always did.

When he gets back to his quarters he kisses his wife soundly, while Hera giggles and tries to join in the 'hugging'. "What brought that on," Sharon asks, dark eyes brilliant as she lifts their daughter up, love and laughter in each gesture.

He kisses Hera next, wet on her cheek. She shrieks with glee. "I wish I still had this book I read as a kid," he says. "Something Pan. I forget the title. About little boys who never grow up."

"Yeah?"

Helo looks over the home he's made on the edge of nowhere and tastes beer on the back of his tongue. "Sometimes growing up isn't that bad." Tomorrow, he knows, he'll resent the role he's been forced into once more, buck against eyes that peg him as nothing, never seeinh the pins he carries on his back, in his hands, gathering them from all over the fleet. That's the problem with tides, but Helo's used to it. He was raised on the sea, to parents who never fully trusted land that held steady beneath them.

"I love you, you know," Sharon says, more sincere than anyone Karl's met. And over top he hears the voice of a woman who never sounded like a girl, who laughs like a criminal, and shows those words without once ever saying them.

Karl doesn't need to hear the words. But it's nice, just the same. "And you know who else I love?" he asks, suddenly animated as he swings his monster of a beautiful child into the air, just to hear her shriek and giggle, clutching at him with trusting little hands. "My ladies."

"Not girls?" Hera asks.

"Ladies."


End file.
